Domestic Left #52: The poverty of the private
Viewing the collections of the rich leaves me cold
I have done my best to like the exhibit The Milton and Sheila Fine Collection at the Carnegie Museum of Art (which closes today), I really have.
The exhibit “celebrates the Fines’ landmark gift of more than 100 works of painting, sculpture, photography, and time-based media” to the museum, from “Western Pennsylvania’s most significant and boldest private collection of contemporary art.”
Not that there aren’t individual artworks in the collection that I quite like, have even been moved by. Chris Ofili’s The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars, which the Carnegie purchased with funds provided by the Fines in 2000, is one of those works that is deeply layered and bears repeated viewing. (It was on display in the museum’s contemporary-art wing until it joined this exhibit, so I’ve spent much more time with it than other works in this collection.) First you see the figure as you walk by, then on closer inspection notice the black stars and the hands, then the eyes in the stars, then the covering of tiny dots of red paint, and at some point you realize that the painting is propped up on elephant dung, and that wow, yeah, this is the guy that Rudy Giuliani picked a fight with in the media back in the 1990s — the eternal return of the culture wars.
I also love Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of seas and oceans, simple black-and-white horizon lines of sea and sky, like shy cousins of Rothkos whose plain dress belies a calmer but no less profound depth. The high-contrast colors of Jane Hammond’s Untitled and the subtle and intriguing grayscale texture of Richard Artschwager’s Weaving Weaving, placed on either side of the doorway to the penultimate room of the exhibit, make a nice argument for the continued relevance of painting. Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Keith Haring reminds you what a master he was at writing with light, and Christopher Wool’s bold “word painting” is one of those artworks I feel like I could just stand in front of, mesmerized, forever.
But I can’t say I care much for Wool’s other painting, or for the majority of works in the collection. Maybe my taste is just different than theirs, which is fine (sorry), but I think there’s something else going on as well, which it took me a long time to put my finger on.
On my last visit, I finally began to warm to the three monumental figurative sculptures in the final room (final if you enter the Heinz Galleries from the Scaife Lounge and proceed east). One of the reasons I visit the Carnegie so often, why I have a membership, is to experience the sense of awe provoked by art made on a monumental scale, art that is a not a thing you can simply acquire (or make) and hang on your wall.
But ... they also made me wonder, what kind of home (or homes) do you have to have to be able to own, and display for your own private enjoyment, art on this scale?
Look, I understand that the patronage of rich people has been providing the resources for the creation of great art since time immemorial — without the Medici there is no Michelangelo; the Guggenheim fortune came from organizing copper and nitrate trusts, from mining, an industry brutal to both its workers and the earth. (Milton Fine made his fortune in the hotel industry in the mid- to late-20th century, arguably a somewhat less nasty industry, at least in that historical period.) And I appreciate the Fines’ “enduring intention to donate [their collection] to the museum for all of us in the region and beyond to appreciate in perpetuity.”
But still, beyond my vulgar class-war instinct to hate rich people, there is something cold about much of the art the Fines collected, something commercial about their tastes for “vanguard art that challenged tradition,” even if they are were acquiring the pieces for their exchange value in public esteem, not cash.
In the same final room of the exhibit with the three figurative sculptures, on your right as you are about to exit, is a wide photograph in a lightbox. Alfredo Jaar’s Untitled depicts maybe a hundred of the “independent” miners who worked the massive open-pit gold mine in Serra Pelada, Brazil in the 1980s.
It is unclear why the miners are gathered together, all standing, most of them looking to the left but a few turning to observe the photographer. Are they waiting to enter the pit? Assembled to hear proclamations from the Brazilian military, which took over the mine early in its operation? They look poor and dirty, maybe half of them shirtless, but confident, if wary.
Each confident in himself, that is — this is not the collective self-assurance of workers about to confront a mining trust, but a collection of self-assured prospectors, each about to scramble to pull as much wealth as he can from this opening in the earth.
The lightbox does indeed create a “powerful physical presence,” as the wall plaque proclaims. The workers are lit from within, the eyes of those turned towards the viewer a piercing, inquisitory white.
One of the more interesting, if not (to my tastes) aesthetically pleasing, parts of the exhibit is the “Collector’s Salon,” which gathers some 19 works in close proximity to each other on an interior wall in one of the galleries, as they might be displayed in a private home.
While I didn’t love most of the artworks displayed on the wall, it did provide a point of connection. As the wall plaque says, “The objects we surround ourselves with in our private worlds often signify important moments in our lives, gaining meaning and personal value over time.” My studio apartment, with its single window and copious wall space (and its lease that does not prohibit attaching things to walls), has turned out to be a fantastic place to arrange my photos, paintings and pastel drawings. No one would mistake it for a “collector’s salon,” and I am its only public, but I suppose it does give my dwelling-place a small touch of luxury.
In many ways, the centerpiece of the exhibit is one of Jeff Koons’s String of Puppies, created in 1988 as part of his “Banality” series of shows. It is a large polyester sculpture depicting an older man and woman holding a string of blue puppies. It would not fit comfortably in any room of any house I have ever lived in or visited.
I loathe Jeff Koons. He is perhaps more personally responsible for, and definitely more gleeful about, the creation of the modern “art market” (which, in addition to being gross, also serves as a way for rich people to avoid paying taxes) than any other artist.
So I was pleased to learn that Koons lost a lawsuit against the photographer whose work he essentially stole, and that his defense that the piece “comment[s] critically on both the incorporated object and the political and economic system that created it” did not hold water. In this one case, at least, the court held that the rich and powerful could not simply appropriate the labor of a working photographer, without recompense, for their private profit and their private homes.
Serra Pelada was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, initially inaccessible except by foot or air. From 1980 until the mine was closed in 1986, flooded to prevent further exploration (it is now, essentially, a massive mercury-polluted lake), over a hundred thousand miners came to stake a two meter by three meter claim and eke what ore they could from this massive tear in the earth.
Pulled by the lure of gold and pushed by the deprivations of poverty, they had no place to live except the makeshift shacks they could cobble together from whatever materials they could find or bring in with them.